None of us is as smart as all of us.

Proposal for a Formal (Commercial) Co-operative

So you’re an independent Ruby developer with all the benefits you can think of.

With a lot of freedom. You work from home, you choose your own assignments, no adjustment to a corporate culture, no managers to deal with etc.

But what about the downsides? No feedback on your work (from which you can learn), not a lot of interaction with other programmers, not easy to consult a colleague on technical or other matters and sometimes the workload is too much or too little.

So that leads me to the question: is there a form of working together without losing the valued benefits of an independent developer. Somehow it must be possible to work together on a commercial basis as individual developers more or less the same way we contribute to an Open Source project.

Living in a community (on an island) where we have a lot of benefit of existing co-operatives (for transport by ferry and the delivery of energy), I of course thought of a formal co-operative as an organization form for working as an collective.

Benefits:

Acquisition as a collective.

More flexible in workload. No more running or standing still. A more even distribution of the workload.

Higher occupation on average.

Share knowledge and practical experience.

Learn by working together on the same project.

More change to do what you do best (specialties).

More change to make some money as a part time ruby developer.

The co-op will also offer the customer more continuity. A customer will value the lower dependence on a single developer or a small company.

Release early, release often:

With this proposal I like to research the possibility of working together in a formal co-operative. Of course I don’t have all the answers (yet), but I’m hoping that we can together answer a lot of them.

Let me know what you think. I made a first draft of a proposal on Github with the following subjects:

Definitions

Objectives

Rights

Responsibilities

Obligations

Financials

Board

Workflow

Examples

I like to invite you to join this discussion and make your contribution by forking and submitting your patches!